60% of Emails To UK Students in 2004 Were Viruses or Spam Says Email Systems

More than sixty percent of all mails to the UK student community were spam and/or virus related during the second half of 2004, according to new figures released today by email management specialist Email Systems, to coincide with the launch of the BETT show this week at London, Olympia.

Email Systems, which monitors the flow of email on behalf of millions of end users in the UK, specialises in the education sector, monitoring tens of millions of emails for students and educational professionals each month. In particular, the company works closely with Equinox Converged Solutions and the London Grid for Learning for whom Email Systems filters the email accounts for more than 1.1 million users in the sector across the region.

In 2005 instances of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks in the education sector look set to follow the alarming trend being set in the corporate sector, where SMEs for example are now being targeted in addition to the giant multinational brands that have historically been the subjects of such activity. In the education sector, DoS attacks typically single out individual domain addresses to bombard them with spam and/or virus ridden email at up to 10,000% the usual rate, with the effect of a reduction or indeed complete failure in internet and email access.

Said Neil Hammerton, Managing Director of Email Systems:

“As a sector which relies increasingly heavily on both email and the internet, the scourge of spam has now reached epidemic proportions within education. Organisations which don’t have provision for blocking spam are not only jeopardising teaching and learning time but potentially subjecting students to extremely unsuitable material, from pornography to gambling and sales of illegal pharmaceuticals on an unprecedented scale.”

For more information on Email Systems, visit stand C10 at BETT, see www.EmailSystems.com or call 0870 141 7070. BETT runs from January 12th to January 15th inclusive at Olympia, London. Altman Technologies are Email Systems appointed distributors for the UK academic sector and will also be exhibiting at BETT, stand C10.